Wednesday, December 07, 2016

Data Center Links: December 7, 2016

Here are some (mostly) recent things I found interesting:

Equinix buys Verizon data centers. I 'think' I saw this one coming... but the biggest player in the industry just got bigger. Just 5 years after Verizon paid $1.4 billion to acquire Terremark, it has sold 24 data centers to Equinix for $3.6 billion. It seems hard to top this asset sale, but I guess we'll see what 2017 brings. I liked Equinix co-founder Jay Adelson's link to the 1998 story about Equinix as a Cisco-backed upstart.

HPE and Schneider Electric partner on Micro Data Centers. HP Enterprise and Schneider are partnering to deliver a complete pre-fab solution for drop-in-place modular data center. I always liked the previous respective versions of a modular solution that were offered, but this partnership makes sense (targeting the edge and IoT, etc). Bonus points for not referencing the solution as a 'virtual data center'. Last week Schneider launched the next generation of its EcoStruxure architecture and platform.

Cray and Microsoft partner for deep learning. At the 2016 Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) Conference this week Cray announced the results of a deep learning collaboration between Cray, Microsoft, and the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS) that expands the horizons of running deep learning algorithms at scale using the power of Cray supercomputers. Research at CSCS utilizes the Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit on a Cray XC50 with more than 1,000 NVIDIA Tesla P100 GPU accelerators.

Dell EMC and VMware launch new Hyper-converged systems.Powered by VMware Cloud Foundation Dell launched the VxRack SDDC as a turnkey hyper-converged solution for both traditional and cloud-native workloads. The total lifecycle offering is built on Dell PowerEdge servers and VMware infrastructure software (vSAN, vSphere, and NSX) and VMware SDDC Manger.